Greek narcotics officers were acting on a regular tip from the FBI to search a ship at Athens’ Piraeus port. The June raid led authorities to containers filled with 33 million pills of the banned psychostimulant fenethylline, commonly known as Captagon. Hidden inside pallets of lumber, the $660 million haul amounts to the biggest confiscation of the pill ever recorded. And where was the lumber loaded? Latakia, Syria.

The value of the recovered stash was worth more than all of Syria’s 2017 exports put together. This was the latest — and largest — piece of evidence pointing to the emergence of the war-torn nation becoming a major new exporter of narcotics, particularly fenethylline. In December, a Syrian freighter en route from Latakia to Libya was intercepted near Crete with 3 million fenethylline pills worth $113 million. Syrian-made Captagon pills, known locally as Abu Hilalain — aka the father of two moons because each pill bears a logo of two crested moons — were impounded in France in 2017.

When Wayne Williams moved to Front Royal, Virginia, it was still run by Southern Democrats who, two decades before, had closed schools rather than desegregate. Feeling like race relations hadn’t improved enough under their leadership, the high school class president organized 70 of his classmates to stand outside precincts, passing out literature for Republicans in 1979. “We made a difference when most of us weren’t old enough to vote,” says Williams, whose yearbook shows him touting a Reagan-Bush “The Time Is Now” pin.

The experience taught him the power of the polls. As Colorado’s secretary of state during the 2016 and 2018 elections, Williams emerged as a refreshing Republican voice for expanding voter access, at a time when his party is better known for pushing restrictions like voter ID laws. The 56-year-old built out a nonpartisan elections office while serving under a Democratic governor now running for president, and Colorado trailed only Minnesota in voter turnout in the midterms. Everyone from the Washington Post to then-Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen lauded the state as having the most secure election system in America, protected against election hacking. And that’s no accident since Williams adopted nearly every measure election experts suggested after reports of Russian hacking emerged. His aim was to be able to “tell you that nobody in Russia, nobody in China, nobody anywhere else in the world can change a ballot in Colorado.”

Every second Thursday night, at some unpredictable and ungodly hour, a cold-pressed shot of good news and intelligent optimism lands in my inbox from Melbourne, Australia. Fortnight after fortnight, the e-newsletter known as “The Crunch” has chipped away at my negative attitudes about tech and helped me realize that the world my kids will inherit ain’t so bad after all. Yes, really.

Currently in its 83rd edition, the newsletter already has 25,000 messianic subscribers (including Stephen Pinker and Bill Gates) across the globe. It may seem strange that a simple curated list of approximately 30 current news stories can inspire such passion. But give it a few weeks and you’ll understand the appeal of being exposed to a regular smorgasbord of reliably informed examples of the ways in which science and technology are helping the planet. As fellow devotee Katie Gertsch puts it (in a website testimonial), “If you’re not already reading it, OH MY GOD why aren’t you?!?”